Herd Hound 2.0: The need for speed

It was April 2011 when work on Herd Hound officially started. Six months later, we were finishing up a port of GAE-Bottle backend to Node.js. Less than Six months from there, we have a completely rewritten frontend and partially rewritten backend, with a reduction in total code base of almost 50%, mean and lean appearance, and very good performance. Let me just quickly recap what we did to reduce the payload and dramatically boost responsiveness, and then I'll cover the details in the following posts.

Prevent text selection during mousemove

Let's say you are trying to implement drag & drop action for your flashy web 2.0 3.0 app. You are happy that it all works, and slap it onto the page. The draggable item appears over that article on the home page, and you happily proceed to test your new functionality. Alas, as you move your cursor, gripping the left mouse button, the article becomes selected, and soon enough, the whole page is marked as selected.

While working on something like the above, I've stumbled upon a nice solution to this problem. The answer is CSS3!

Useful online tools for web developers

We are currently working on v2.0 frontend for our service, and testing our new email interaction model (I'll write in more detail about that in upcoming posts). During development of the new features, I've come across a few tools that came in very handy.